MAKING THE GRADE
How does your child’s school rank?
A handful of students from Calgary’s Bishop Carroll High School are guaranteed an illuminating educational experience — quite literally.
That’s because the Grade 10, 11 and 12 students in the school’s new Authentic Science Research 35 class — which started this past year — get to make the trek to one of Canada’s foremost scientific facilities: Canadian Light Source, a particle accelerator based in Saskatoon.
The ultra-high-tech equipment will allow students to put their scientific inquiries to the ultimate test.
“The bottom line is it’s authentic research,” says Laurie O’Connor, a physics teacher at the school who developed the course. “It’s student driven and kids are the ones that have to set up the scientific procedure.”
While the program has been running for eight years as part of Bishop Carroll’s physics club, the Calgary Catholic School District school decided last year to launch it as a formal course.
“They were putting hours and hours of work into this, so we thought they should get some credit,” says Amy Webster, the physics department head at the school.
The innovative course marks a growing focus among Calgary high schools to provide students with authentic learning experiences — considered the gold standard of education because students learn to apply knowledge to solve realworld problems.
Initiatives like the one at Bishop Carroll are going on every day in schools across the city, whether public, part of the Calgary Catholic system or private. And these efforts are paying off as city schools rank among the best in the province, according to the 2018 Fraser Institute Report Card on Alberta Secondary Schools.
Calgary private and charter schools again were top performers, making up six of the top 10. But overall, schools are showing positive signs of improvement, including diploma completion rates, says Peter Cowley with the Fraser Institute, a right-leaning thinktank.
“It’s now up at 84 per cent and compared with about 82 per cent in 2014,” says Cowley of completion rates.
That is a dramatic improvement over completion rates in the 60 per cent range in the early 2000s, says Cowley, who heads up the annual survey that largely measures schools based on provincial diploma exams.
“So essentially, what that means is the kids are graduating in the year you’d expect them to graduate at a rate higher than any year they’ve done before in Alberta.”
While private and charter schools often rank among the top schools, some public and Catholic schools fared very well, too. Among them is William Aberhart High School, part of the Calgary Board of Education, which ranked 11th out of 285 Alberta high schools.
Calgary Catholic School District schools only trailed Edmonton Catholic Schools in terms of performance among the large school divisions. Calgary Board of Education (CBE) and Edmonton Public Schools were third and fourth respectively, Cowley says.
He adds the report card has become an essential tool for parents seeking to ensure their highschool age children get the best educational experience possible.
“The fact is a lot of parents don’t really care, but if this is important to them, they will be looking for schools that are in their general neighbourhood and over the last five years have done relatively better than others.”
He adds parents also often use the report card as an annual audit of the performance of the school their teenage children attend. Yet the survey, which largely measures exam scores in math, science, social studies and language arts, has its critics.
“We know that kids from a higher socio-economic background with higher educated parents fare better academically,” says Barb Silva, with the public education advocacy group Support Our Students.
“The survey is not a measure of how the school is performing or how the teacher is delivering curriculum. It’s more a representation of that child’s home life.”
Additionally, The Alberta Teachers’ Association has had misgivings about the report card since its inception about 20 years ago.
“No matter how many different ways you interpret them, the average scores of a one-time test, written by a different set of students every year, will never give a parent the information they need to choose the school that is best suited for their child,” says the union’s president Greg Jeffery.
The kids are graduating in the year you’d expect them to graduate at a rate higher than any year they’ve done before in Alberta.
Cowley says he is not surprised the teachers’ union is opposed to the Fraser Institute’s report card.
“The union’s position on these is ‘There is no di1erence between one school or the other that can be explained by the skill or expertise oo our members,’ ” he says.
Yet, he argues the report card is the only measure available that is based on data orom every high school in the province.
Ir. Neil Webber, who oounded Webber Academy, a Calgary private school, says one reason the private school does consistently well in the survey (it tied oor prst this year with Old Strathcona in Ndmonton) is that it draws orom applicants who want to peroorm well academically.
At public schools, “peer pressure among students is ooten such that io you get really high marks, you’re a bit oo a nerd and maybe you don’t pt in so well.”
Eut Webber students revere high marks, he adds.
Yet at Eishop Carroll, excellence is also held in high esteem.
The Authentic Science desearch program is prooo positive.
“When we’re providing these opportunities, our students experience authentic learning,” Webster says. “When that happens we take science outside the classroom and build a greater understanding oo our natural world.”